Technology Countdown: Pit stops

Pit stops, previously seen as an afterthought, have come to the forefront of racing

Whether it's during a race, at a practice session or in the garage
during downtime, it’s impossible to take stock of a NASCAR pit crew team
without noticing the sheer volume of instruments at its disposal.

From
walls of computers spitting out valuable information to sets of
state-of-the-art tools that enable a team to do a complete pit stop in
(ideally) less than 14 seconds, never has a crew been put in better
position to shave valuable milliseconds off a pit-stop time.

Progress
wasn't always measured in milliseconds, though. In the early days of
NASCAR -- the 1960s, when men such as Richard Petty, David Pearson and
Ned Jarrett ruled the track -- the pit stop was, to practically every
team, an afterthought.

With so many races in that era topping
out at 100 miles on dirt tracks, pit-road strategy consisted of figuring
out fuel mileage to make sure a driver had enough gas to finish the
race, along with cleaning the windshield and the grille. There was no
need for anything else, certainly not replacing tires.

Pit-stop times dropped considerably in the 1960s, though, once Leonard
Wood applied some logic to the process as tracks got bigger and cars got
faster. Wood, a member of the 2013 NASCAR Hall of Fame class, cut the
standard pit-stop time nearly in half over the course of one season.

At
tracks such as Charlotte Motor Speedway -- non-dirt tracks that
necessitated tire changes -- Wood noticed the top teams could generally
change two tires and add fuel in approximately 45 seconds.

After
studying the process, Wood’s immediate innovations consisted of using
double-sided lug nuts, quick-pull handles for the gas cap, lighter jacks
and a power gun in place of a four-prong lug wrench. His team’s
standard times dropped from 45 seconds to approximately 25 seconds.
Folks in NASCAR took note.

If that was the start of modern-age
pit stops, it’s now the Golden Age. Today’s six-member teams can change
four tires and add fuel in as little as 11 seconds thanks teams
increasing funding for their pit crews and technological advances that
were incomprehensible as little as 30 years ago.

When Mechanix
Wear first ventured into NASCAR in the early 90s, the company showed up
at the 1992 Daytona 500 with 200 pair of high-tech gloves, and noticed
crew members were using baseball batting gloves, volleyball kneepads and
standard running shoes -- a Frankenstein of mismatched parts on pit
road.

“That’s how we sort of got started; and since then, we’ve
developed 20-25 products that are based on basically whatever the
different guys on pit road need,” said Ted Abdon, director of racing at
Mechanix Wear. “So if a team orders gloves from us for five or six guys,
it’s entirely possible and likely that it’s six different models of
gloves.”

That Mechanix makes a different glove suited for
different responsibilities on pit road illustrates just how far the
pit-road perspective has come.

For example, gloves made for tire
carriers have a grip similar to the gloves worn by wide receivers in
the NFL. Tire changers wear a different glove, one that has a hard
composite at the knuckles for when the crew members invariably pound the
rim while using it to guide their hands.

During Jimmie
Johnson’s streak of five consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup Series
championships, the jackman for the No. 48 met with Abdon to discuss the
possibilities -- and benefits -- of wearing a different type of glove on
each hand.

“The way teams approach pit stops now, you can’t
give up one second on pit stops all day long,” Abdon said. “You can’t
have a slow pit crew and make the Chase (for the NASCAR Sprint Cup). You
just can’t.”

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